The Prosecution: “Every time you appear on the scene people begin to die.”

Given the (restrospective) controversy about the levels of violence in the pre-cancellation series, starting the new one with an episode that so wryly pokes fun at these criticisms is a risky move. With knowing winks to the audience in lines like “I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself” and “Why do I have to sit here watching Peri get upset?”, as well as the Doctor suggesting that the first episode is boring, you could read that the production team are acknowledging the issues of an unworkable Doctor/companion dynamic, sadistic scripts and backward-looking stories. Which is all well and good, presuming they have an idea of how to fix them. And if Season 22 showed us anything, it was a production office out of ideas.

‘The Mysterious Planet’ is a game of spot the Robert Holmes stories, as he re-uses some of his oldest ideas (the two young people selected to become companions of Drathro, as in The Krotons; the idea of a tribe of technicians and savages worshipping a half-forgotten computer as in The Face of Evil; the devastated Earth and undeground stations from The Sontaran Experiment; Glitz and Dibber as Garron and Unstoffe). And, as a Doctor Who story that’s about watching a Doctor Who story and commenting on it, ‘The Mysterious Planet’ is Carnival of Monsters for the 1980s.

Holmes instinctively recognises that the Trial needs to hold up a mirror to the Doctor, and interestingly makes this a matter of point and counterpoint – the whole planet is schizophrenic, with the educated underground dwellers, and the tribe of the free both worshipping arcane and forgotten technology in the form of the Black Light totem and the “Immortal” robot. And as the Doctor descends into the underworld to face Drathro, Peri is taken to the surface to meet Katryca meaning both plots began to move towards a common destination. This is reflected in the court room, in the duality of the Doctor and the Valeyard – and if Holmes knew where the Trial was ultimately going, it makes absolute sense for this first part to be set on an Earth gone wrong and divided just as the sixth Doctor has gone off the rails and faces his darker self. But, to an extent, the Ravolox bits of ‘The Mysterious Planet’ are incidental. The point of this is to give us an entirely traditional Doctor Who story, and use the Trial format to dissect it, highlighting the typical moments where the Doctor is clever to get himself out of a fix; where he’s forced to do the villain’s bidding, and when he chooses to interfere. By going back to basics in this way, Holmes is rebooting the series.

His focus on questions of the sixth Doctor’s “well-known predilection for violence” implicitly strikes back at BBC bosses. Holmes had been here before, of course, as script editor – after the brouhaha following his own The Deadly Assassin, when the show was similarly in the spotlight for excessive violence, and the new producer Graham Williams was ordered to tone down Holmes and Hinchcliffe’s approach. On that basis, it’s not hard to guess where Holmes’ sympathies lie, and why he and Saward (who otherwise seem to be two quite different writers) seemed to find common ground. Holmes has the Doctor give a rousing defence of his methods. The court is told, “A certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable”, which is all well and good until you consider that the kind of graphic detail in ‘The Mysterious Planet’ – a few fantasy laser guns and a stoning – bear no comparison to the body horror of Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors or Revelation of the Daleks. It’s like showing a video of the fight scenes in Star Wars and claiming that means Cannibal Holocaust is ok for kids. And because the show is pointing out relatively mild action scenes to critique, it makes the transgressions of Season 22 even more indefensible.

The second exhibit,  Philip Martin’s sequel to Varos, is an odd beast. ‘Mindwarp’ itself starts off pretty well, with the Doctor behaving like his next incarnation and going to investigate the mystery of gun running on a planet of caves. There’s also a sense that Saward is still holding up Androzani as the story he wants writers to tell: the comparisons here are obvious – Thoros Alpha and Beta are twin planets, Beta is riddled with caves, there is a grotesque capitalist organising the sale of weapons, and a monomaniacal scientist conducting his own experiments.

Then Martin has the Doctor driven mad by Crozier – and the spectre of Season 22 is raised again. Perhaps Martin’s aim was to show what would happen if the Doctor really were as bad as his critics make out – here, he betrays both Yrcanos and Peri, tortures his companion and seems like he’s only out to save his own skin. But it’s botched. As in Varos (and unlike Androzani) the Doctor becomes complicit in the violence rather than apart from it, however much Martin attempts to exonerate him. Because his behaviour is explained by Crozier’s brain experiments, why in the courtroom the Doctor starts to denounce the veracity of the Matrix is bizarre and tends to unnecessarily obfuscate matters. No wonder the cast weren’t quite sure whether all of this is meant to be for real or some elaborate sham. And what does this ultimately amount to? Yet another Colin Baker story where the Doctor has gone mad and does awful things to Peri. Hmm.

It gets worse. Warned by Crozier that he only has a very little time to save Peri, the Doctor wanders about fomenting rebellion and chatting to a comedy space slug, indulging in banter with Yrcanos and basically abandoning Peri to her fate. And what a fate: given she’s been such an object of physical lust throughout her time, this is the ultimate body horror – the personality and self entirely eradicated and the frame occupied by a cold, alien monster. We don’t even see the moment of death: she’s just gone. It’s a potentially awesome exit, and because of the Doctor’s lack of urgency, the countdown to her demise is even more horrible – and it’s hard to argue against the Valeyard that the Doctor’s “negligence had made it impossible for her to live”. What lets these four episodes down is the doubt about why the Doctor is behaving so out of character. Unreliable narratives can be interesting, if there’s a point – but here, it just feels like the writer, script editor and director hadn’t really discussed it. Thanks to this slapdash approach, we end up with a Doctor who looks guilty as charged.

The Defence: “Is this relevant?”

The Doctor’s defence against these accusations – against the idea that he is a failed incarnation whose principal effect is to cause chaos and death, is a story plucked from his own future: ‘Terror of the Vervoids’. “Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?” asks the Valeyard, incredulously. And apparently, astonishingly – it is!

The painful self-analysis of Parts 1-8 has been replaced by a breezy tale of mayhem and intrigue. The courtroom scenes are genuinely incidental, and barring a couple of instances of falsified evidence, this could have played as a straightforward story. To some, that’s a strength. However, placed in the trial format as the Doctor’s best example of the good he does, it looks unimpressive. Particularly since, if you replaced Tryst with Lasky, Mandrels wth Vervoids and zoology with agronomy this is pretty much a re-hash of Nightmare of Eden. Sadly, although it shares the earlier Baker story’s weak design work and variable acting, it lacks Tom Baker, Douglas Adams and Lalla Ward. Instead, Pip and Jane focus on their perennial obsession with unethical female scientists. Oddly, given Colin Baker has cited them as favoured authors, the Bakers also undermine the Doctor by making him a self-avowed fat clown. If this is the best defence of the era that both Colin Baker and the sixth Doctor can come up with, we really are in trouble. And the climactic accusation of genocide tends to undermine the whole Trial format – what was shaping up into a critique of the Doctor (and the show’s) raison d’etre suddenly becomes about a crime of which the Doctor is unambiguously innocent.

The Verdict: “Goodbye Doctor!”

Robert Holmes’ final script is a fascinating summary of his obsessions. The off-kilter Victoriana, the crepuscular world of cluttered rooms and rickety fairground paraphernalia, half-heard children’s laughter and the sound of  hurdy gurdy hint at the world of childhood terrors Holmes conjured up in his greatest scripts. By uncovering the secrets of ‘The Mysterious Planet’ and unmasking the Time Lords’ conspiracy, Holmes shows he had a good idea of where this was going. And his master-stroke is making the chief villain the Doctor himself – who else would have the moral authority to really nail the Doctor on his worst flaws? But, the twist is the Valeyard is the Doctor at the end of his life, having surrendered to the Time Lord love of order and self-preservation at all costs. It’s a shame they bottled out of making him a full-blown future incarnation, but nevertheless, the point’s plain: the Doctor has to mend his ways or this is his future.

Sadly, the Bakers’ script for Part Fourteen suffers from similar flaws to their earlier efforts: too many under-developed plots and a story that’s extended by just throwing in another left-field development: here, it’s the collapse of the High Council and the Valeyard’s attempt to assassinate the jury. After Holmes sets up the Valeyard as an intriguing Hyde to the Doctor’s Jekyll, the Baker’s fumble the denouement by transforming him into a duplicate of the Master. Apparently, the Doctor’s darkest impulses consist of wanting to steal the Time Lords’ secrets and dress up in Victorian costumes, which puts an interesting spin on Remembrance of the Daleks‘ revelations.

As the climax to 14 weeks of trial, this doesn’t cut it: the idea of a future Doctor, desperate to avoid his final death, is wasted, the Master reverts to his worst use as a black hat baddie, and whereas Holmes seemed to be heading to a place where the Valeyard and the Doctor could finally resolve the questions of his interference and the deaths these cause, the Bakers tie it all up in a jolly romp that lacks the introspection and validation that Holmes seemed to be suggesting.

Ironically, catharsis (of spurious morality or otherwise) is what The Trial of a Time Lord is lacking. The Trial was explicitly set up to confront and purge the worst excesses of Season 22. Instead, it ends up confirming them. Only Robert Holmes – who’d lived through these problems before – saw the solution. The Doctor should have dismissed the Valeyard’s trumped up charges and unmasked the only person who could hate the Doctor that much: himself. And, to top it all, ripped down the hypocrisy of the Time Lords’ non-intervention policy once and for all. Instead, Philip Martin gets to crowbar his own story into the Trial, complete with a cowardly and untrustworthy Doctor, and then Pip and Jane off-handedly have the Doctor accept that he’s bad, and promise that he’ll get better if he gets another chance.

“It seems I must mend my ways,” said the fifth Doctor at the end of yet another massacre. But two years down the line nothing’s changed. We have yet another Doctor who’s failed to find another way, still steeped in blood, and a script editor still clinging to The Caves of Androzani as a viable model for stories rather than the one-off rescue job it actually was.

Surely it can’t go on like this?

Much of the argument of my Season 21 review was that script editor Eric Saward had a deeply cynical view of the show. In his fifth Doctor stories, the Doctor invariably carries a gun, shows little compunction in joining in with the violence and every story ends with a massacre or else victory being achieved only through terrible sacrifice. And then we get The Caves of Androzani, which is a kind of catharsis – in which the fifth Doctor sacrifices himself rather than once again being drawn into the sort of violence that killed Adric, sickened Tegan and wiped out the Silurians.

Season 22 therefore offers the chance of a new start, in which a Doctor divested of the failings of the Davison incarnation can get back on course – even if The Twin Dilemma was possibly the worst way to follow up Androzani – giving us a murderous and unlikeable Doctor rather than a winning one, and ending with a huge two-fingered salute to the audience and a “like it or lump it” parting shot from the production team.

But Season 22’s biggest flaw (and it has several) is that it doesn’t define a new direction. Instead, it’s treading water, lazily drawing on last year’s big hit with various masked villains lusting after Peri. The overall impression is of a series clinging to the past because it has no idea what it’s for any more. In that sense, Attack of the Cybermen is an apt season opener. Like Johnny Byrne’s Davison stories, it’s structurally weak – the first sign that the production team have failed to learn anything from Arc of Infinity or Warriors of the Deep. The story jumps between locations and characters without ever giving an idea of how they are related or why. In the new 45-minute episode format, the cliffhanger is at the midway point and should therefore be the tipping point of the story from the set-up and complication of the first part to climax and denouement in the second. But by the end of Part One, it’s impossible to say what the story is about or what’s at stake. And the second episode is equally baffling. Because we never see Mondas, never have any visibility of how it will attack the Earth, or what is really at stake, the whole story revolves around the abstract notion of changing a fictional history (i.e. Doctor Who‘s own continuity) that most of the audience have no sight of. Whole sub-plots, such as Bates and Stratton’s escape, fizzle out in random bloodbaths. Everyone in the universe seems to know about the Time Lords and regeneration. The dialogue is atrocious (what American teenager in 1985 would say, “On one occasion you even referred to me as Jamie!” rather than something like, “You even called me Jamie one time!”?). The violence veers into sadism, with a head being shot off, decapitations, crushed and bleeding hands, one character boiled alive and Lytton begging for euthanasia. Oh, and the Doctor grabs a gun. And this is meant to be business as usual.

Vengeance on Varos, commonly feted as this year’s (sole) success story is better, because it’s actually about something.  For once, the cynical nastiness of Saward’s universe becomes a comment in itself, on a capitalist society that treats people as a commodity, and which will torture and even kill them in search of profit. The much-cited “video nasty” theme is clearly subordinate to the wider critique of Sil’s aggressive capitalism. His admiration for the Governor’s scheme to sell videotapes of the executions – “That is enterprising”, and his treatment of them as “product” make this an obvious mid-1980s anti-Thatcher polemic. Whether you agree with Martin’s politics or not, to treat this as being about video nasties in any meaningful way is to misread the script. The overtones of oppressed miners, the implication of Varosian family values (Peri and Areta are to be transmogrified as an example to women who aren’t obedient), and the idea of an invasion to protect business interests all chime with contemporary attacks on Thatcher’s government. Push it further, and you could see the Governor, hide-bound by the need for regular ballots of a largely indifferent electorate, as a hapless trade union leader trying his best to get a fair wage for his brothers from the capitalists.

But against this, Vengeance on Varos is a pretty unsavoury episode, complete with florid descriptions of decapitation and torture. The acid bath murder is possibly the most controversial scene in all Doctor Who – but what’s actually worse are two later scenes, the first when the Doctor grabs a gun (two out of two stories so far this year) and shoots up the control centre, and then later, rigs a deadly poison trap for Quillam and the Chief of Operations, killing both of them and another guard. Abandoning wit or persuasion and going straight for premeditated, violent death is something no other Doctor would seem to so readily contemplate. Andrew Cartmel, who rarely ventures controversial opinions about his predecessors (ahem) cites this as a good script but a bad Doctor Who story because the Doctor becomes complicit in the violence rather than aloof from it. And it’s hard to argue against that.

So, so far, Colin Baker’s Doctor is as steeped in violence as the fifth at his worst. And, worse, with his James Bond quips, seems at best inured to it, and at times to even delight in it. Vengeance on Varos also shows that, although Nicola Bryant’s a decent actress, a big part of this year’s problems sit with Peri. Her relationship with the Doctor has become entirely dysfunctional, and it’s poisoning the show. If they look like they hate being together why would the audience want to spend its time with them? The way she cowers when he shouts makes Peri look like a victim of domestic abuse, and shows the Doctor up as a monster. There’s no way the series could conceivably continue in this vein.

It takes the infamous Pip and Jane Baker in The Mark of The Rani to actually make the sixth Doctor anything like a viable proposition. I breathed a sigh of relief when offered a gun the Doctor replied, “I’ve given them up. Guns can seriously damage your health.” Were they not so adamant that they saw Doctor Who as strictly for kids, the Bakers, both Labour Party activists, could have made something more of the implicit politics of a mining community under threat both from modern production techniques and a domineering woman intent on exploiting them to shore up her own power base. That said, a colourful story that appeals to kids is at least better than a gloomy story that appeals to no-one, so things are definitely looking up.

After Pip and Jane rescue the sixth Doctor, it’s another sigh of relief to see Robert Holmes’ name on the titles of The Two Doctors: as we have seen, in his previous script he rejected the Sawardistic universe of Peter Davison’s final season and in so doing redeemed the fifth Doctor. All of which makes this serial doubly baffling. You get the sense that he doesn’t approve of the sixth Doctor – “I haven’t felt at all myself lately” – and is aware of the emerging criticism of his unlikeability. The response, at least in this episode, is to try to make him as much like his earlier incarnation as possible: mercurial and slightly embarrassed when his pomposity is pricked. The second Doctor and Jamie’s opening TARDIS scene – in which Jamie needles the Doctor for his inability to steer the TARDIS – feels like a parody of those endless scenes of Peri doing the same to her Doctor. And throughout, the second Doctor and Jamie are handled in much the same way as the sixth and Peri. Jamie (like Peri) moans a bit and is an object of physical lust for the monster; the Doctor throws his weight about, criticises his companion’s accent (though “mongrel tongue” is pretty cruel for the second Doctor) and reaches for a knife when his life is in danger. The problem is, Troughton and Hines make a much more likeable double act than Baker and Bryant – playing against some of the more confrontational lines and thus robbing them of the unpleasant overtones, so even though Holmes is going out of his way to give us a rather less avuncular second Doctor, he’s still preferable to the current incumbent.

But the real hook of The Two Doctors is an overt theatricality. To an extent, that’s always been a key to understanding Holmes stories from Carnival of Monsters to The Talons of Weng-Chiang. But here, Holmes has coupled it with his other obsessions. The body horror of the Hinchcliffe era is here: Dastari is a latterday Davros, setting Chessene amongst the gods; the idea of alien consumption of the human body (seen in The Ark in Space) is taken to an extreme and mixed with the charnel house horror of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And the revenge tragedy of Holmes’s last hit, The Caves of Androzani, is evoked with a finale in which most of the characters die horribly, blood flowing freely as the truth behind the double crosses is revealed. In that sense, Oscar quoting Shakespearean revenge drama is surely a deliberate clue: Holmes has given us Titus Androgum.

Titus Andronicus has been described as Shakespeare’s inhuman play, replete with cannibalism and dismemberment, where “justice and cookery go hand in hand”. In Titus Andronicus, a messenger enters carrying a severed hand and heads – and here Shockeye enters carrying Stike’s severed leg. Where it falls down is there’s no Titus; no Hamlet. Dastari – a noble character brought low – is so sidelined that he can’t play the role of tragic hero, and despite a great performance from Jacqueline Pearce, Chessene is unreadable – a blank slate of a character, whose plans to take over the universe are barely articulated and seem to change moment to moment. And elsewhere, Holmes is gleefully unrestrained by any lingering sense of responsibility to children. Oscar is stabbed through the stomach in a grotesque scene that’s written as comedy, and performed by James Saxon as such, but is treated as tragedy by Bryant and Gomez. The perfunctory murder of the Sontarans – and Stike’s triple death – is grossly over the top. The death of Shockeye, like those of the guards in Vengeance on Varos, is made nasty by the Doctor’s quipping response. This is all about effect – the work of a writer perhaps disillusioned with the ingredients he was forced to work with, and cooking up a dish that’s excessively fatty. There’s also the possibility it’s a parody of the excesses of Doctor Who in this era. But all of this is to some extent redundant, because the story is all about impact and sensation. Holmes keeps talking about the Androgums as sensual creatures devoted to sensory pleasures, but with no substance and The Two Doctors is the same – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Then, after the grisly artifice of The Two Doctors comes the artless disaster of Timelash. There’s a reason why it is often cited as the worst ever story, and it’s hard to defend any aspect of the episode. The dialogue is entirely dreadful (“A period you call 1179 A.D.”, “No-one lives there and few visit other than you”): plot points are introduced without preamble (the ruler is “only ever seen on a screen” and “I thought the Borad had banned all mirrors”), and them reemphasised in the most tiresome, repetitive way (Peri’s bizarre speech about the matt dullness of the planet). Most of the actors are deadly earnest: Jeaneanne Crowley seems to be aiming for ethereal space princess and landing on Prozac junkie. And the disasters just come thick and fast: the rubber Bandril, the beekeeper guardoliers, the TARDIS seatbelts, Peri reading up on Doctor Who continuity and recognising a locket of Jo Grant and remembering the Daleks’ time tunnel from the story before she joined. The Doctor is back to his smug, unlikeable Twin Dilemma self, bellowing at (an admittedly nagging) Peri, and sending her into obvious danger so he can chat with Tekker. Timelash does have one good idea, though: it relies on being made in a period of the show when everyone is expecting old monsters to turn up to re-fight old battles, so the idea of making a sequel to an unseen adventure is par for the course for the “normal viewer” (who this year has already had to sit through a sequel to a story no-one has seen since 1966) – and because the Borad remains unseen for the duration of the first episode, the possibility remains that he will turn out to be a returning villain, which must have got a few fans excited.

After this, Revelation of the Daleks looks like a different programme (although it’s practically a sister piece to The Two Doctors). The direction is astonishing: Harper pulls out all the stops – crash zooms, scrolling frames, direct-to-camera soliloquies, steadicam – to make this visually exciting and energetic. There’s a feeling that he’s trying almost too hard to live up to the awesome reputation he built with The Caves of Androzani. Meanwhile, Saward has also learned from that story: the messy structure of Resurrection of the Daleks is corrected. Instead, Saward keeps this moving by introducing a string of double acts, each with a pretty clearly established motivation. The plot develops through these double-acts and motives overlapping, like a series of Venn diagrams. And sitting outside the action, watching it unfold and passing comment – through the cameras and holographic display screens Harper used on Androzani – are Davros and the D.J.: both literally talking heads (as is Stengos – a reminder of Saward’s more gruesome interests).

Every story this year has featured a theme of bodily transmutation – into a Cyberman, a bird, a tree, an Androgum or a Morlok, so Stengos’s transformation into a Dalek continues that theme of body horror in the most grotesque way possible. In fact, the script delights in its horror: frothing corpses, bodily degeneration, assassination. The worst elements of human nature – pride, greed, cruelty – are on display. The design is superb: the new cream-coloured Daleks look marvellous gliding through the catacombs – their gold finish fitting in with the tasteless, gaudy, glistering Las Vegas kitsch of Tranquil Repose. As Peri remarks, it’s all in the worst possible taste. Saward is telling the kind of story only Doctor Who can tell, plundering various sources to synthesise a unique result. The reality is, Saward has brought the show to the point where the ugly, tasteless, cynical horror of all this doesn’t feel particularly out of place.

Sadly, having kept the Doctor and Peri out of the action while he sets it up, Saward then has them play virtually no part in its resolution: Peri cowers behind the D.J. and, because it’s a Saward script, the Doctor accepts a gun and wanders the catacombs while Takis, Orcini and ultimately the “proper” Daleks sort out the problems. Saward has made the Doctor as redundant fictionally as Michael Grade has in reality. As an afterthought, he at least has the Doctor suggest a solution to the galaxy’s food problems – grow some – but really, this is one of those episodes where everything would pretty much have transpired as it did had the TARDIS never landed. A few minutes into the episode, it dawns on you that this is just another Sawardistic massacre: first Vogel, then virtually everyone else. There should have been another way, but by this point we’ve stopped caring.

As the season ends on a freeze frame and an uncertain future, you might reflect that this is a series that has lost its way: delighting in the worst aspects of cannibalism, torture and corruption. There are no heroes in Saward’s world – Natasha is a murderer, Takis has made a deal with the Daleks, which is implied to involve him becoming the new head of Tranquil Repose. Orcini, the noblest character, is a paid killer. The last two years have seen the character of the Doctor attacked and undermined, the role of the companion reduced to a yapping irritant, every victory accompanied by gory deaths, and a cynical grey universe that no longer deserves to be saved – and a show that no longer deserves to be made. The series has consumed itself. How apt that Season 22 should end with the Doctor finding his own gravestone.

In a previous post, I waxed lyrical about the vexing question of the Doctor’s age, and concluded that in the classic series he is 450 and in the new series 900 Earth years old, and that all other ages given are in Gallifreyan time.

So, based on these criteria, and the evidence we have on screen, the next question that occurs is – which is the longest-lived Doctor? Based on the evidence, this is the countdown…

11. The ninth Doctor – less than a year

Going by his behaviour in Rose, in which he seems to notice his face for the first time, the ninth Doctor is pretty fresh. And once he’s hooked up with Miss Tyler, the Doctor consistently gives his age as 900. There are no obvious gaps, so it’s possible this incarnation lasts about the same length of time as it takes his one season to pan out. Ultimately, it depends whether you believe it’s this version or the eighth which fought in the Time War, but so far all the spin-off fiction implies it was McGann’s Doctor.

10 (or 2). The second Doctor – about three years (or, possibly, several hundred)

With no obvious gaps for missing adventures – he’s travelling with human beings throughout his tenure –the second Doctor seems to last about as long as his onscreen adventures, three years. Of course, if you buy into Season 6B then potentially he’s the second longest-lived incarnation, which is one explanation for his hairstyle in The Five Doctors…

9. The third Doctor – about five years

Hard to say, because, vainly, he never gives his age. He lasted five years onscreen, and there’s not much to suggest that this isn’t the case. Certainly, for his first three series this Doctor was confined to Earth so there’s no possibility of his ageing significantly in unseen gaps. It’s possible after Jo dumped him he went on a long spin around the universe but there’s nothing to confirm this, and every indication that he burnt brightly, but briefly.

8. The tenth Doctor – six years

Based on the ages he gives, the ninth Doctor is 900 years old when he regenerates, and the tenth says he is 906 in The End of Time, which means the tenth Doctor lives a little fewer than six years. He seems to age about a year per onscreen season – so, by Voyage of the Damned (made at the start of Tennant’s third year) he says he is 903. The “gap year” obviously accounts for a slightly longer time period in which he encounters the Virgin Queen and the Red Carnivorous Maw– thankfully, it’s never revealed if these are one and the same.

7. The fourth Doctor – seven years

Like the tenth Doctor, he seems to age about one year per onscreen season. He’s “something like” 750 Gallifreyan years in Pyramids of Mars, and is no more than 760 when he regenerates meaning that although he’s the longest-serving Doctor by screen time, Tom Baker’s is amongst the shortest lived.

6. The sixth Doctor – over thirty years

The fifth Doctor is about 900 Gallifreyan years when he regenerates, and the sixth makes it to 953. Obviously between Peri and Mel, this incarnation has an extended series of adventures – so if you want to believe in Frobisher, Evelyn and Grant then you just go right ahead.

5. The seventh Doctor – over thirty years

Is unambiguously 953 Gallifreyan years old when he regenerates from the sixth Doctor. It’s hard to say precisely how long he lasts but the supplementary material in the BBC Book Vampire Science implies he’s 1009 Gallifreyan years old when he eventually pegs out. Plenty of time for all those New Adventures, then.

4. The fifth Doctor – about ninety years

Given that Tom Baker’s Doctor is 760 in Logopolis and Colin Baker’s is 900 in Revelation of the Daleks, somewhere along the line either the fifth or sixth Doctors have nearly a century’s worth of unseen adventures. Given that there is no obvious onscreen gap for Colin Baker – he’s travelling with Peri continuously following his regeneration – then the fifth seems to be the likely candidate. Which means either Nyssa is very long-lived (which fits with the 1000+ age of the eponymous Keeper of Traken), or in one of the obvious gaps – let’s say between The Awakening and Frontios when he goes to drop off Will Chandler – the fifth Doctor takes a break from Tegan.

3. The eleventh Doctor – almost 200 years

He’s 907 in his first season and something like 1103 in his second. So far, he’s managed to clock up about 200 years experience and counting without even going a bit grey. At this rate, he’s on track to become the most durable Doctor of all. That donation of regeneration energy from River must have included a healthy dose of Botox and HRT.

2. The eighth Doctor – nearly 300 years

Hard to be certain, but it’s likely that this incarnation lives for a few hundred years despite only featuring in one onscreen story. That certainly gives a lot of scope for all those audio, novel and comic strip adventures. In the BBC Books range he’s trapped on Earth for 100 years after the destruction of Gallifrey, and the Big Finish audios include a lengthy incarceration on Orbis.

1. The first Doctor – about 450 years

There’s no competition. The second Doctor is 450 years old in The Tomb of the Cybermen, and in the absence of any lengthy gaps between stories (he’s been travelling constantly with human companions who haven’t aged), we can assume the first Doctor was about the same age when he regenerated. Which means either he was remarkably well-preserved for a tetra-centenarian, or those faces in The Brain of Morbius really were previous iterations.

‘The Mysterious Planet’ is a tough story to get a grip on. There’s an ineradicable sense of disappointment hanging round it – as Robert Holmes’ final finished scripts, after an 18 month wait, after all the excitement of the hiatus fans expected more. And they got what’s been described as ‘mundane’, ‘not terribly involving’ and ‘a mess’. And it’s true that there are maybe too many knowing nods towards criticisms of the previous season – “Why do I have to sit here watching Peri get upset?”, “a certain amount of graphic detail is unavoidable”; “You drain my energy resources with your constant infantile bickering” – without really necessarily just fixing them and moving on.

But for all that, it’s still a Robert Holmes script, and still has a certain power to it. Particularly the climax, in court, when, in between insulting the Doctor’s immaturity, the Valeyard finally gets to the nub of his argument:

“Lives were lost because of your meddling”.

And that’s the unanswerable question, isn’t it: lives are lost because of the Doctor’s meddling. The Time Meddler might as well be the show’s title: it’s just what he does. And he gets people killed. Yes, of course, in the service of the greater good, even to save the universe. But even so, people die.

“If you hadn’t come here, on a whim, would anyone here have died?” asks Joan Redfern. “How many more? Just think: how many have died in your name?” sneers Davros. And the tenth Doctor never has an answer. The Valeyard suggests the Doctor is a destructive force, that it would be better for him never to have left Gallifrey. And here, we get to the heart of the trial: is it better for Doctor Who to continue, or for it to die?

It’s hard to credit people who suggest the courtroom scenes are an irrelevant distraction – to Holmes, they’re the only point. The adventure on Ravolox is deliberately generic, an opportunity for the Valeyard to question the basic premise of the series by asking the jury (that’s us) to watch a standard Doctor Who adventure through his eyes.

And in the climax, Holmes focuses on that message. The climax involves the Doctor appealing to the humanity in Drathro, begging the robot let him save the lives of all the organic life on Ravolox. And let’s be clear: Drathro isn’t even threatening to kill the people of Ravolox, he’s just not willing to allow the Doctor to act to save them. Drathro’s inaction in the face of genocide is therefore implicitly compared to the Time Lords’ non-interference. In an ivory tower, the rest of the universe can go hang, so long as the gods don’t actually have to get their hands dirty. However, the Doctor refuses to remain detached, to just leave in the TARDIS. He argues ethics with the robot, he talks about his belief that every life, no matter how small, has value and purpose. In the end, The War Games defence still stands: the Doctor might get involved, but it’s better than doing nothing.

After that, the actual solution – pressing a few buttons then running away from the explosion – is oddly prescient of the Russell T Davies series where the plot was always subordinate to characterisation and moral dilemma. The Trial of a Time Lord is very much about the character of the Doctor. On this basis, ‘The Mysterious Planet’ is a purposely disposable piece of fluff, but The Trial of a Time Lord, at least as written by Holmes, is almost gripping. But what a shame they couldn’t jump directly to Part Thirteen.

In my last post I reflected that The Caves of Androzani felt like the natural conclusion to the darkness of Season 21. And for all that some commentators have suggested Robert Holmes is writing for a generic Doctor rather than the fifth, this seems disingenuous given how well the story wraps up the concerns of the era. We’ve already seen how the Doctor has never really got over Adric’s death – and his final word makes that absolutely clear. But there’s more to it than that.

Warriors of the Deep ends with a damaged Doctor wishing he could have resolved the story without killing all of the Silurians. Resurrection of the Daleks’ bloodbath concludes with him resolving to mend his ways.  Even on Sarn, his action (or inaction) results in Kamelion’s destruction and the Master’s apparent death. So, by the time of The Caves of Androzani the fifth Doctor has very much become damaged goods. Then on Androzani Minor he finds yet another planet populated by the kind of amoral soldiers he met on Seabase 4 and Davros’s prison ship. All the pieces are in place for another story where “there should have been another way”, where the Doctor is once again forced to stoop to the level of his enemies in order to survive.

And what’s interesting is that Robert Holmes – that cynical, mordant writer – looks at Saward’s cruel world of mercenaries, guns and massacres, and he rejects it wholesale.  He has the fifth Doctor refuse to engage with the narrative. He makes no attempts at mediation, giving orders, taking charge or persuading people to make noble gestures of sacrifice. All the Doctor wants to do is to take Peri away from this dreadful place.

This in itself is astonishing. We haven’t seen the Doctor quite so detached from the horrors around him since the Hartnell historicals – and The Caves of Androzani does have a similar tone to The Massacre. It looks at what happens when the Doctor refuses to play his part in the story. There’s a hole where he is supposed to be, sorting all this out. And because it’s a Doctor-sized hole, it exerts such gravity that the rest of the narrative collapses in.

What Holmes suggests is the Doctor has taken the decision to “mend his ways” by not getting involved in the violence – not even to ask Jek for help in curing Peri’s spectrox toxaemia. Their survival will be thanks to the Doctor’s noble self-sacrifice alone, not bargaining with self-serving monsters. Maintaining his own morals when the rest of the world has abandoned theirs is to be this Doctor’s salvation. It kills him, of course.

Saward, sometimes it seems to his own horror, suggests that only a more “robust” Doctor, willing to carry a gun and kill, can survive in a hostile universe – even if that means everyone dies. Holmes goes to the opposite extreme by having the Doctor conscientiously refuse to participate in Saward’s world, saving Peri and redeeming himself in the process. And that, Holmes implies, should have been an end to this particular dead-end of storytelling. Sadly, it’s not. In the next two seasons, time and again Saward’s more “robust” Doctor arrives in equally cynical surroundings, resorts to violence, and to an extent, every story ends with “there should have been another way”.

Tragically, Saward never works out what it might be.

There are three quotes which for me sum up Season 21:

“There should have been another way”

 Warriors of the Deep is another messy script from Johnny Byrne: its biggest problems are a lack of structure and a reliance on the worst elements of Saward’s Season 19 episodes. While last year’s season opener gave us Colin Baker in person, this one introduces the sixth Doctor in spirit with a needlessly confrontational Doctor, who (in Davison’s worst moment) makes a weak James Bond quip as he assaults a security officer. Eric Saward’s vision for the series is taking shape, with squabbling, surname-only military officers urgently declaiming their lines. Everyone speaks in the same voice, and characterisation goes out of the window to be replaced by, well, nothing really. The Silurians say “Excellent!” just like the Cybermen. It’s hardly an original observation – but this is hardly an original script. It’s clearly inspired by Earthshock, with the Silurians, who were never futuristic military villains, shoehorned in. “There should have been another way” is practically the strapline for the next three years, where every victory comes at a terrible cost. So much of what’s wrong begins here. The Doctor’s uncharacteristically negative rant about “pathetic humans” and his general murderousness; the snot-oozing monsters, and the macho posturing are all present and correct. It’s fitting that the story ends on a shot of the Doctor bruised and battered, given that this story does so much to knock the heroism and joy out of his character.

The season gets back on track with The Awakening and Frontios. The difference here is palpable. For a start, we have a range of characters speaking in their own voices – from Polly James’s wonderfully acerbic Jane Hampden to William Lucas’s vaguely ineffectual science officer (who looks more like a 1970s vicar). In The Awakening, the only characters speaking in cod-Shakespearean Sawardish are those possessed by the evil alien Malus and forced to act as warmongering puppets. In Bidmead’s script, the declamatory dialogue is a way to make a point about the colony leaders’ reliance on macho posturing and empty bravado rather than real leadership. In particular, Frontios is completely brilliant – and a clear influence on the new series episodes Utopia and The Hungry Earth. Everything quite literally comes together in its final episode. In the fifth Doctor’s finest hour the last humans are saved, the retrograde attack ends in a truce, and the Tractators are not killed but reduced to harmless burrowing animals. And then there’s the TARDIS’s reconstruction in a climax that’s so cleverly judged that Steven Moffat pretty much repeats it in Blink. This is the polar opposite of Warriors of the Deep‘s massacre, and about a billion times more satisfying. In fact, barring a clumsy death scene for Brazen and some less than impressive monsters, Frontios is near perfect, and the last scene is beautiful.

“It’s stopped being fun”

Given another year to fix its script problems, there is no excuse for Resurrection of the Daleks – and an excuse is definitely needed. The fun and wit of the last 3 weeks is quickly forgotten with an opening massacre on the rain-lashed streets of Southwark. Saward again seems to be going for gritty, military SF, with a pointlessly belligerent and confrontational crew aboard the space station, striding about and shouting at each other (that’s going to happen a lot in the next 2 years, culminating in Brian Blessed). He also throws in body horror, with melting faces, an Alien homage with a Dalek mutant in place of a facehugger, lashings and lashings of Ian Levine-pleasing continuity about the Movellans, and far too many plots. Unlike Earthshock, which built up suspense through a relatively confined and focused first episode in the caves only revealing the Cybermen at the end, here Saward only waits 15 minutes unleash the Daleks. That might get away from the bog-standard Part One “…of the Daleks” cliffhanger, however keeping them off screen longer would at least have let him set up the structure of this world before knocking it down. And yet again, obscenely, the Doctor quickly grabs a gun and carries one practically the whole story. Resurrection of the Daleks is a hollow experience. Like Eleanor Rigby, no-one is saved: everybody dies in futile gestures of defiance. One wonders whether Saward deliberately chose not to differentiate the warring factions of humans and Daleks (even the space station crew change into Dalek mercenary uniforms) to highlight the themes of self-destruction and the pointlessness of conflict. But the episode seems too witless for that. Tegan’s disgust at the Doctors mission to murder Davros hints that Saward at least recognises the morality of the character. But when even the Doctor threatens to abandon that morality in favour of murderous violence (ordering Stein to “deal with” the Daleks’ human allies), the compass of the series is shattered. The Doctor (or rather, Saward) has no defence against Davros’s accusations of weakness. So when he fails to kill Davros, the fifth Doctor does, indeed become what he’s often wrongly accused of being: ineffectual. After the triumph of Frontios, this feels like a deliberate undermining of the character.

Fortunately Planet of Fire pulls a blinder and resurrects the fifth Doctor, making him full of energy, distracted, but still caring for the welfare of his friends. Even the death of Kamelion is clearly written and performed as an act of mercy, since the Doctor has just had to induce a massive heart attack in the murderous robot to prevent it from killing him and Peri (who is beautifully set up as the new companion – in a very new series way, the Doctor even takes her hand inside the volcano control room). Turlough’s departure is a great exit – there’s a real fondness in his farewell and his parting shot to Peri. It’s possibly the most touching departure since Sarah Jane’s, in a highly under-rated story.

And then, overshadowing the rest of the season, is The Caves of Androzani. In context, this feels like a synthesis of Season 21: it’s set on another desert planet of caves (polished smooth like glass), with an unwieldy monster, poison gas, androids disguised as humans and a military SF feel. That this is done much better than Resurrection of the Daleks isn’t quite the point. What it does show is how nearly Season 21 got to getting it right: the big difference here is partly the characterisation and dialogue – rather than a cod-Shakespearean monotone we have people speaking in slang. And the structure is excellent. Most importantly, Robert Holmes knows that the Doctor must never stoop to the level of his enemies. The second episode makes it abundantly clear that the Doctor and Peri are trapped in a world without morals. Even the upright General Chellak is willing to send a young soldier to certain death in order to cover up his blundering execution of android copies, and the President, although insightful about Morgus’s true motives, is willing to send workers to labour camps – “We might make that seem morally justifiable”. Minor itself, with its poisonous bats’ nests, scalding mud and vicious wildlife, is equally hostile. Never has the Doctor seemed more like the only light in the dark.

This is the end point of Season 21’s descent into darkness. The Doctor has already lost one companion this year thanks to the death and destruction around him. He’s had to kill another, and watch his oldest acquaintance burn. And despite Turlough’s redemption he’s still haunted by his failure to save Adric. The Caves of Androzani is as far as you can go with “There should have been another way” and “It’s stopped being fun”. Everyone on Minor dies, victims of the chain reaction triggered by the Doctor’s arrival. And the Doctor himself realises this: he refuses to lose another friend. He refuses to surrender to the violence and horror of this nasty world, or to buy into its cheap, base motives.  As a result, he’s never been more heroic. The final race to save Peri is genuinely tense. As the whole planet – the whole narrative – collapses around him, the Doctor wins his smallest yet most important victory: saving a single human life. After the massacres of Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks, Robert Holmes has taken the dark, grim horror of this season to its natural extreme, and in so doing purged it. What’s needed now is what the end of this episode promises: change – and not a moment too soon.

“I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not!”

The Twin Dilemma‘s worst crime is that The Caves of Androzani’s closing promise is squandered. The series is, like the new Doctor, unregenerate, not reconciled to change. The new Doctor’s initial bombast and conceit is pleasingly fun, and the very early scenes suggest he and Peri could become a kind of screwball comedy double act.

And then, it all goes horribly wrong.

What this episode needed precisely was not an insane and murderous Doctor forcing himself on his companion. If anything, what it needed was to drop these characters into a colourful story, as different from The Caves of Androzani as possible, to see how they react. To an extent, new Doctors’ first stories are always about the absence of the central character – but they get over this by making their plots exciting and interesting. Instead, The Twin Dilemma has a plot marred by appalling acting and dreadful dialogue, plus a Doctor who isn’t absent but just entirely wrong.

And so, while on the surface you have a story that’s lighter and potentially more fun than anything else this year, you have a Doctor who has internalised “There should have been another way” and “It’s stopped being fun”. The Doctor himself is becoming the horror he’s been fighting against. Whether you like it or not…

The new approach, in the short term, is nostalgia: not “like Doctor Who used to be” as such, but rather incorporating lots of kisses to the past. The 20th anniversary can just about get away with this, but much of the challenge with this year is that it feels like it’s marking time. Through so many of this year’s stories there’s a wearying sense of the burden and the boredom of history and the curse of immortality: from Omega’s desperate need for a mortal existence, Mawdryn’s quest for death, the echoing void the Eternals try to fill with their games, and Rassilon’s reminder that “to win is to lose, and he who loses wins.” It’s not an inappropriate idea to explore for a show in its 20th year, but it is a curiously melancholy one. Immortality suggests stasis: unchanging, unending sameness: horribly illustrated by the petrified Time Lords around Rassilon’s tomb. As such, The Five Doctors, for all that it takes this era’s nostalgia to its natural climax, shows that change and renewal are preferable. It’s strange that the story that takes this nostalgia to its natural conclusion is the one keenest to shake it off, and get onto the next thing.

Bookending the anniversary with two Gallifrey stories makes a kind of sense, although it doesn’t help that Arc of Infinity is structurally a mess. There are two perfectly acceptable stories there, but the links between them are as botched as Omega’s bond with the Doctor. Tegan investigating the kidnap of her cousin and revealing an alien plot is one. The resurrection of Omega is another. In the previous decade, this might have been a two-plus-four parter – like The Invasion of Time. Here, we just get a mush of story which plays out without ever troubling itself to really articulate to the audience what’s at stake.

Boredom, as a theme, continues in the remarkable Snakedance – a story which, unlike its predecessor, is a lesson in how to structure. The Doctor fills in the Mara’s continuity at the same time as Ambril downloads the new history of the Sumaran Empire and the legend of the return. The story has the two on an inevitable collision course because the Doctor knows the Mara but not the culture it sprang from, and Ambril knows everything academically but has no insight into the truth. This is made clear in the “Six Faces of Delusion” – Ambril sees it only as an artefact that disproves the legend of the return until the Doctor interprets its real meaning. The Doctor is a true hero – even more so than any of his predecessors. When he says, “I must save Tegan, it was my fault” there are portents of his ultimate self-sacrifice on Androzani. Perhaps Adric’s death has affected him more than Time-Flight implied.

The very next episode introduces Turlough, and while the Black Guardian trilogy is partly the story of his redemption, it’s also the story of the Doctor’s. The end of Mawdryn Undead implicitly references Adric’s death in Earthshock: another race back to a ship about to explode in Earth’s orbit, to rescue a young male companion as the Doctor is urged on by Nyssa and Tegan  – but this time with a positive conclusion. And the Doctor seems to view Turlough as his amends for Adric, hence his eagerness to take the untrustworthy boy on board the ship. In that context, what comes next has a real emotional resonance. Turlough’s role as “the new Adric” is made explicit at the beginning of Terminus with a scene in which he inherits his dead predecessor’s room and promptly decides to bin half of Adric’s stuff. And the trilogy ends in Enlightenment: a story that is ultimately about making the right choice and finding salvation, and is overflowing with beautiful ideas and images (the TARDIS being hidden inside the Doctor’s mind; the Black Guardian’s wistful yearning for chaos, the White Guardian’s reference to the echoing void of eternity, and “Enlightenment wasn’t the crystal. It was the choice”). The Doctor’s studied insouciance as he encounters the two most powerful beings in the cosmos is a transcendental moment, and it finishes on a glorious, redemptive note as Turlough, reconciled to the light at last, asks to go home. This would have been the perfect moment to end this season.

Sadly, The King’s Demons prolongs things for another week, and it’s another eight months before the main event: The Five Doctors. Its past Doctors are caricatures, of course – the first Doctor is grumpy but insightful, the second an anarchic tramp, the third a man of action and the fifth an incorruptible hero – but that just proves that the Doctor’s wisdom and ability comes from having been all of these things, rather than frozen in one state. Against him, the villains all have only one default setting. Hence we get the most Daleky ever Dalek, chanting “Exterminate!” and shooting indiscriminately, Cybermen mindlessly blowing the nearest things up, the Master reverting to petty villainy and the Time Lords succumbing to the corruption of power. I used to moan that this story was just a panto, spectacularly missing the point that the potted Doctors are exactly what the general viewers needed. And I must have overlooked that the final scene is the perfect way to end this story, this season, and even the last 20 years of the show. After showing us the limits of nostalgia, Terrance Dicks leads us to the natural conclusion that the series should be renewing itself again.

And it does – but perhaps not in the way anybody was expecting.

Peter Davison is my Doctor. My earliest memory is of the fourth Doctor regenerating into the fifth. The Five Doctors was the first story I had on tape. I still have vivid recollections of images that have stayed with me since the early 1980s: Kamelion in the straw. The Myrka, peering through a smashed bulkhead. The mini-Malus crouching in the TARDIS. Tractators circling the Doctor. Davros looming out of the freezing fog.  These are my stories.

So, re-watching them – properly re-watching them, one episode at a time rather than half-watching whole stories – has been quite some experience. I’ve discovered I grossly under-valued Peter Grimwade’s stories, particularly Planet of Fire. I’ve realised I shouldn’t ever have iconoclastically championed Warriors of the Deep. Most of all, I’ve realised Peter Davison really is my Doctor. He’s everything I want the Doctor to be – brave, never giving up. Witty, with a nice line in sardonic humour. Never cruel, or cowardly. A hero.

Various commentators have suggested that Season 19 looks back to the earliest years of the series. There are three companions in the TARDIS, one of whom is desperate to get back to present-day Earth. The Ship, for the first time since 1969, refuses to land where it’s told. There’s a whole two episodes practically set inside the spaceship, and suddenly a much more “educational” tone to some of the episodes. All this is true, and with Ian Levine on board as the semi-official continuity advisor it’s hard to argue that at least some of it isn’t down to his advice. However, at least as important are the lingering influences of Season 18’s creative forces – Christopher H. Bidmead and Barry Letts.

Barry Letts’ impact on the series can’t be underestimated. The creative revival of the early 1970s was the most complete reformatting of the show that’s ever been attempted in such a short space of time. He rescinded the dead end of Earth exile while maintaining the Doctor’s links to contemporary England, resurrected old monsters, half-invented the Master, cast Tom Baker and commissioned Genesis of the Daleks. Then, he came back and oversaw John Nathan-Turner’s first year on the show. There’s also plenty of evidence to show he was involved in The Five Faces repeat season – editing the end of Carnival of Monsters, for example. Bidmead clearly respected him, and Levine has often written passionately about his love of the Jon Pertwee years.

And Season 19 is the most Pertwee-like since 1974. Clearly the Buddhism and anti-colonial message of Kinda is merely a shared interest of Letts and Bailey (and a giant snake is a good substitute for a giant spider). And the Master’s regular recurrences can’t be anything but an explicit call back. But elsewhere, there are overtones of Pertwee to be found particularly towards the end of the season. The Visitation practically lifts and shifts the opening of The Time Warrior – a mysterious light appearing in the night sky and falling to Earth, to the consternation of the locals. And Time-Flight is the best Baker and Martin script they never wrote: not just because of the dodgy CSO, the blobby monsters, or the overly ambitious ideas. Not even because of the Master in a rubber mask. It’s the references to the Great One and the 1970s style mysticism of the Xeraphin that make this feel like a charmingly flawed throwback to an earlier era. Or possibly Grimwade had seen the repeat of The Three Doctors and made a few notes.

The Pertwee era influences are, if anything, even stronger the following year with the revenge of Omega, powerful and mystic blue crystals, a corrupt colonial Earth, the return of the Brigadier and a reimagining of The Three Doctors. So, for all Davison cites Troughton as his inspiration, the writers of his first two series are more attuned to Pertwee, although generally through the lens of Season 18’s “hard SF”. And unlike the Pertwee era, Season 19 has no single creative voice. Four to Doomsday comes across as though it’s been written from Bidmead’s character notes: Adric witters on interminably about maths, Nyssa gets excited about apparatus, Tegan whinges about Heathrow and the Doctor blithely potters about making weak racist jokes. Actually, it’s fascinating to watch Davison visibly grow into the role across the course of the story. You hear that familiar note of exasperated panic creeping into his voice for the first time as he deals with Tegan’s hissy fit in the third episode. And although it’d be a stretch to argue everything comes together in the final episode, Four to Doomsday is a rare example of a Doctor Who story that gets better as it goes along. The Doctor’s final confrontation with Monarch, persuasion of Adric back to his side, audacious rescue of Bigon and space walk to the TARDIS are an example of him spectacularly snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Sadly, Dudley sets a trend for this era: between Tegan’s panicky TARDIS theft and Adric siding with the baddies, the villain’s machinations are less dangerous to the Doctor than the selfish behaviour of his companions.

Elsewhere, Bidmead’s thoughtful approach is evident in both Kinda and his own Castrovalva. The latter makes sense of the new, twice-weekly broadcast by splitting itself 50/50 between the TARDIS in Parts One and Two, and Castrovalva itself in Three and Four. The contrast between the sterility of the TARDIS and the verdant Castrovalva works extremely well, and it’s clever that Tegan, an Aussie girl, is suddenly so much more confident out of the TARDIS than inside it, whereas Nyssa’s out of her comfort zone outside the Ship. Her hilariously unsuccessful attempts to get back to nature are one highlight of a surprisingly funny story. Bidmead’s hardly remembered for his comic touch, but it’s his one liners (“That’s democracy for you”) that stick in the mind better than some of the more laboured “hard SF” stuff.

Kinda is one of the best performed stories in Doctor Who’s history. On the downside there’s a lot of expository dialogue which is useful in clarifying the plot and is better than no explanations at all (cf. Ghost Light) but does feel like it’s been inserted at the insistence of a nervous script editor. And then there’s the pink snake – but then, perhaps Buddhist evil always manifests itself as a rubbish version of a common phobia. But against this: “you can’t mend people”, “it’s all a bit too green for me”, the fifth Doctor effortlessly taking charge and displaying utter confidence in the face of ultimate evil, the lovely coda in the forest. It’s all much more elegant and considered than almost any other story, provocative in the right way, beautifully written and beautifully structured – and structure, so intrinsic to Bidmead and Bailey, is something that this nervous new script editor is far less comfortable with.

The script editor Eric Saward’s own contributions to Season 19, The Visitation and Earthshock, are the shape of things to come – though oddly (thanks to the postponement of The Return) not for another 18 months. And they are exactly as you might expect. The Visitation establishes the new house style from the off. Everyone speaks the same language, and banal monikers such as Scythe Man replace actual names (and characters). Worse, practically the first thing the Doctor does upon meeting fruity thespian Richard Mace is to grab Mace’s gun and inspect it with relish. And later, emblematically, he replaces the destroyed sonic screwdriver with another gun. “I never miss,” he says with pride. Elsewhere, the Doctor yells at Tegan, is obnoxious to Adric and Nyssa and behaves as atrociously as his next incarnation. That Davison can incorporate all of this into the character of the fifth Doctor, established, thanks to the running order of Season 19, as thoughtful and empathetic, demonstrates both his skill as an actor and the lack of work the production team have put into the new Doctor. Meanwhile, vast swathes of incident seem to have been introduced simply to occupy the companions without advancing the story. The climax, a fumble in some hay, is bathetic, except for the lingering shots of the Terileptil, screaming as his skin blisters and burns (cf. Oliver Reed in The Devils), which are just sadistic.

Earthshock is much better. Saward is good at building tension: all the characters are in jeopardy, and even the continuity works: Adric’s discussion of Alzarius, E-Space, CVEs, Logopolis, Romana and Black Orchid tie together his whole journey in the TARDIS. Even his reasons for wanting to leave were foreshadowed in The Visitation, where he bemoaned the lack of attention the Doctor gives him. Indeed, before the first episode of Earthshock they’ve barely exchanged more than a glance since Kinda. But the dialogue and characterisation are still weak, and the pay-off to Adric’s death at the start of Time-Flight is horribly fumbled. It starts off by answering the question of what happened to the freighter’s escape pod, as if that’s clearly more important. There’s the start of an interesting debate about why the Doctor can’t go back to save Adric. But it’s dismissed by a wave of the Doctor’s hand and the promise of a nice holiday. It’s difficult to know how kids would have reacted to this at the time. In retrospect it looks crass, especially given a tiny tweak to the script (have the debate interrupted by the Concorde’s time turbulence, hurling them straight into the next adventure) could have covered the awkward join.

Season 19 is clearly in transition. With three script editors, an inexperienced producer, and the shadows of Barry Letts and Ian Levine hanging over it, it’s hardly surprising that there’s little thematic consistency. Instead, the producer resorts to first principles and imposes a kind of unity through the wheeze of Tegan’s desire to go home, ending the season, perfectly naturally, with the TARDIS arriving where it’s been trying to get for the past nine weeks. But for all that, there is something unique about Season 19: the sense that this is all a bit more experimental than usual, with lots of focus on people dressing up and assuming other roles. Maybe that has something to do with the context of New Romantics, and the fashion styles of 1981. Or maybe it’s a happy coincidence, but between Tegan’s costume sketches in Four to Doomsday, the ball in Black Orchid, the Master’s Arabian Nights fantasy and the android disguised as Death there’s a running theme of clothing and identity. In an era of the show which, more than ever before, creates a specific image and brand for its leads, this is interesting. It’s as though by adopting the clothes of an English cricketer, the fifth Doctor has adopted that whole ethos of fair play and laid back sportsmanship. Or perhaps it’s the new producer trying on various costumes to see which one fits best. What will I be this week? A military SF space movie? Or a gentle 1920s Sunday night murder mystery?

So while that inconsistency is understandable, it’s also troubling. Since 1977, Doctor Who has been plagued by false dawns and hesitant new starts. The 1970-76 series were overseen by four key personnel – there are more than that involved in just this one year. And while the death of Adric feels like a final break with Season 18’s approach, it’s far from clear going into the anniversary year what the new approach is going to be.